McMartin: Regret and death - What we carry to the grave

Jean Campbell is 78, suffers from pulmonary fibrosis, and a month ago she not only knocked on death’s door she was prepared to walk through it.

“I wanted to die. I was too ill. I was so logey from all the pills and dopey all the time, and I thought, ‘This is not the life I want to lead.’”

The life she led had both good and bad in it: born in Kamloops of Japanese parents, discriminated against during the Second World War, losing both parents in an accident at age 13, left a widow and single mother when her first husband died of prostate cancer at age 35; but then came a good second marriage complete with five stepchildren, financial security and a happy middle and old age.

And now, she faces the probability of death, though Jean is enjoying a reprieve. Her condition recently improved to the point where she can leave her bed at Vancouver’s Marion Hospice and go home. She has some time left.

We had come to talk to Jean on the subject of regret. There’s been buzz about a recently released book entitled The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

It was written by Bronnie Ware, an Australian woman who, besides being a singer-songwriter who runs “an online personal growth and songwriting course,” worked in palliative care for a few years.

The book has that feel-good sunniness of an Eat, Pray, Love, and is meant to be a cautionary primer on how to live, using the rear-view mirror perspective of the near-dead. It’s Ware’s accounting of what she said were the recurring regrets of the patients she cared for in their last days.

In descending order, those regrets are about what you’d expect:

• The regret of not having the courage to live the life you wanted to lead.

• The regret of working too hard.

• The regret of not expressing one’s feelings more.

• The regret of not staying in touch with friends.

• The regret of not letting oneself be happier.

Everyone goes through life with some regret, of course: Life does not go as we wish it. But as Eat, Pray, Love commodified self-fulfilment (or fatuous self-indulgence), the same dynamic is at work here. Regret is bad. Regret is a condition. And living in a way that doesn’t cause regret at the end of one’s life can be addressed preventively, as one might address dental care. Express your feelings. Floss daily. Die happy with a full set of teeth.

And the top five regrets of the dying? There are more? Are we as regret-riddled as that at the end of our lives?

Well, said the palliative care professionals I talked to in Vancouver, no, we aren’t. At least, of the thousands of patients they helped, those patients rarely talked in terms of regret.

“People,” said Louise Belisle, clinical counsellor at Marion Hospice, “generally die as they have lived. And they don’t usually talk in terms of regret. By the time people come here, they’ve either done their bit of self-reflection, or, if they are feeling regret, it’s not something they’re revealing.”

Dr. Romayne Gallagher, head of residential and palliative care for Providence Health, is Canada’s leading palliative care expert. Her experiences, too, were at odds with Ware’s.

“I must admit when I kind of looked at this book, I thought, this has not been my experience.

“We don’t see a lot of people with regrets. They don’t tend to voice them.

“I think people realize that life is not a perfect road, and you’ve done your best, and you have to let go of some things. And I think people are more concerned with what’s happening to them [as they face death] rather than looking back.”

In one respect, though, Gallagher said, regret at the end of one’s life is now a modern luxury, if “luxury” is the right word.

“Before, death was a pretty quick event,” Gallagher said, “and we didn’t have time for a whole lot of reflection. You could be dead within a few days. Generally, now, we’re looking at dying after a prolonged course of illness. Only 10 per cent of us will die suddenly. So, yeah, I think the ability to regret is a bit of a luxury they didn’t have in the past.

“But the healthier thing,” she said, “is to let go of that than live with regret.”

Which is to say, in the past, the brevity of our lives informed the way we lived. Now, that’s being turned upside down. The longevity of our lives has begun to inform the way we die.

But should it? Life cannot be viewed from the wrong end of a telescope, human beings make mistakes, and regret will always be with us, as much as one might try to avoid it. The question is, should it define one’s life as you face your death? What, ultimately, do you wish to take to your grave?

Jean Campbell, for example, had some truly terrible things happen to her in her life. She lost her parents, lost a husband, experienced racism. There were things in her past she had trouble talking about. As she neared death, she was asked, did she feel any lingering regrets?

“Well, no, really, not overall. But the only remorse I had was that I didn’t get a good education.”

She had not finished high school. The things that happened to her in her life, she said, did not allow it. But good things happened to her, too, she said, and she had known true happiness in her life, and that was what she cared to remember.

pmcmartin@vancouversun.com

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McMartin: Regret and death - What we carry to the grave

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